OFP Session I

Part I

CC = Climate change

GHGs = Greenhouse gases

Catherine: I want to welcome you all to this event, the Open Forum Portland. We will be talking about CC and what if anything needs to be done about it. We’re going to be looking at the science part in the following session. I wanted to let you know how this came about and how scientists thought about doing something in psychology. Essentially for me it came from a meeting in Denver in April 2010, ?, which is a process-work type of meeting where we look at conflict resolution and get different types of issues that particularly handle some tools of psychology with what is called a process work, they were by Arnold Mendal and other people. And as I was attending this meeting and really enjoying what we were doing- looking at contentious issues, looking at the different aspects of them and how it should work out the difference of people playing sometimes the role of skeptics, people disagreeing with the main point of view. I thought maybe we could apply this to CC, because I was getting frustrated by the lack of action, particularly after Copenhagen where nothing happened in terms of setting up some actions to reduce the emissions of GHGs in particular. I thought maybe we could use some of the tools that were presented in this workshop for CC if we started looking at what we are doing about CC from a conflict perspective. So I went to talk to Arnold Mendel, and he was pretty enthusiastic with us from the start. He said you can count on me and we can do it, just tell me when. So that was a good door-opener for me. And you can imagine it helped entrain a lot of people into this activity. The next step was to convince the scientific community that using scientific tools was a useful approach, so I talked to a lot of colleagues, and one of them ---- said well, you know, if you want to really convince everybody you have to convince Jeff --, because Jeff is both a climate scientist and a Jungian psychologist. So I emailed Jeff immediately and he was enthusiastic from the start. He has been such a good co-organizer that I can really only thank him very much. Now, I just get to the meat of the meeting, but before that thank all the people who have accepted to participate. We have no underwriters so everyone is doing it on their own time. [introducing facilitators, thank yous]

Jeff: [Thank yous] The objectives. When Catherine and I started talking about what to do with this time, I think the very first thing that emerged was dialogue. Hopefully, that’s what we can accomplish over the next 3 days. Provide a forum where people can feel free, open to standing up and asking questions, taking positions, and really have an open dialogue around this central issue of CC. The way that we’ve structured this process is to start tonight in terms of what we know is happening to the Earth, and CC. And then the 2nd part of tonight is going to be about how that science is or isn’t connecting into issues like social policy issues and societal issues. So tomorrow, we’re going to pick up on that theme in the morning, and look at the implications of CC for the social dimension and its relevance to how people are reacting to this issue, emotionally and cognitively. After we’ve looked at sort of all the affect that can arise, the social dimensions of this problem in the morning, then in the afternoon Bonnie and I will be looking at the path the path for transformation. There we’d really like to focus on where we are now and where we’d like to get to in the future. A lot of that is going to be kind of imagining the world that we would like to see in the next few decadesto the end of this century. So we hope to involve people in exercises around that. So now we’ve gone through transformation by Saturday evening. Arnie and Amy are going to break their magic into the mix and use their process work to look at the tension, the polarities that can exist around this issue. Sunday morning is really meant to be a reflection around what’s taken place over the 2 ½ days. Looking back, but also looking forward- where do we go from here, in terms of what we’ve accomplished this weekend, and where we want to take this in the future. So those are sort of the objectives and the structure is carefully designed to get us from the basic science through the social dimensions into the more challenging issue of transformation and how we emotionally deal with this issue into a more reflective space Sunday morning to think about where we will go in the future. [giving next session place and time]

Valerie: So I would like to start this session on the science of CC. I am Valerie –-- I’m a climate scientist from France. I’m a climate scientist focusing mostly on natural archives of climate, so the past changes.

Orangon: I am from UCSB, the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. I’m a social scientist by training, my background is in political science, economics, public policy. I am not only studying issues of public policy but I also have the good fortune to play a fairly active role in public policy process around some issues.

Valerie: We wanted this session to be focused on the type of information that will help you make decisions, or cause you to change your position on whether or not human activity is acting on global climate. There is a very large scientific community in the world, thousands of scientists working on CC, which is quite exciting, being a scientist when climate is changing. So we wanted to organize this session in two parts. The 1st part on the scientific challenges, the tool and methods. And the 2nd part on the relationships between science, policy, and the general public. For the 1st part, we have invited 2 scientists from Oregon State University to give a presentation on the methods used in climate science. So I would like to introduce you to Karen Michelle. She’s an assistant professor and she’s working on climate modeling and the feedbacks linked with changing of water vapour, clouds, snow and ice. And also to introduce you to Andres Shittner, who’s also an assistant professor working on climate modeling the role of the ocean, and how to make use of past climate data and climate modeling to understand the way the system is working. Their idea is to answer a number of frequently asked questions about climates.For instance the difference between weather and climate. Why is it so difficult to predict the behavior of the climate system which is a complex system. And the tools that are available and the strengths and weaknesses that are associated with them.And also the way to understand the role of human activities on the climate.

(14min45sec)

Karen: We’re going to switch back and forth. Ok so just to start out, can I see a show of hands of people who feel comfortable with the basics of climate science? So the 1st topic that we wanted to cover was the relationship between weather and climate. So I just grabbed the last week or so showing the weather over the US. You can see some storms are moving into the Pacific Northwest. All sorts of complexity and you know that past 10 days or so, the skill of the weather forecast just isn’t that right. That’s because there’s all this complexity in the system. It’s very difficult to make predictions beyond 10 – 14 days. Why can we say anything at all about climate? If you think about another system you’re familiar with, the annual cycles. This plot now shows data from 40 averaged together and it shows you each month what the temperature is. As you can tell, there’s a definite pattern to it. In the summer it’s warmer, in the winter it’s colder. So if you take the average over a long enough time period, all the storms and all this messy stuff gets smeared out. So you are still able to make statements. Now I’m not able to say what the temperature on June 1st will be, of next year, but I can say with a lot of confidence that it’s going to be warmer on June 1st than it will be on December 1st. And so this is an example of when you look over a longer time period, the noise that you see, these little storms, they average out and you really see the fundamental processes driving the atmosphere, or the air temperature in this case. And in this case, it’s the seasonal cycle, it’s the relational tilt between the Earth and the Sun. And in terms of climate, we’re looking at things like the relationship of temperature and CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s sort of like looking at how the height of people has changed through time. People are all different height (I’m short, she’s tall). But if you look over time, people are more likely to be tall now than they were 100 years ago because nutrition has changed, medicine has improved. And you can sort of think of the human impacts on climate like that. We’re changing the overall structure, so even though you have these little storms going through, or these little changes going on, you still have long term averages. And I do want to say, we are a small group, feel free to ask any questions.

So, in interest of time, I’m going to skip it. But I do actually have a movie that shows some of the observational records, the change in temperature over the last 100 years. You want to see it now? I was told we had to do 15-20 min… This starts out at the end of the 1800s and what you’re seeing is the difference in temperature at each location from the average temperature over I believe ---,so you can see as you progress throughout the20th the overall trend is warming, so when you get to the end it is warmer on average than it was 100yrs or so ago. So this is representing the fundamental change in the climate system. Improved medicine and nutrition is in this case the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Speaker: Thinking about the answer to this, people would say things like, a volcanic eruption which released CO2 in the air, more than the US did in a year, so, what’s the point? Would your answer be that those volcanic eruptions were always happening so they are part of the base?

Karen: That’s a key insight, that you do have volcanic eruptions throughout history. However, they don’t emit more CO2 and you don’t have one every year. Volcanoes impact climate through aerosols but the aerosols only stay in the stratosphere for a couple of years. And they do have a cooling effect and we can see it. In fact I have a picture later on where you can see that decrease in temperature after some of the bigger eruptions of the past century. And in fact that’s one of the ways we used to test climate models. And so the amount of CO2 that’s released by volcanoes compared to the amount that’s released by humans is small. There are definitely other natural effects that are happening, but the effect that humans are causing is swamping. An analogy I’ve heard is: you’re on your bike riding down the street, and suddenly you’re on the pavement. Was it because a little rock in the road that you hit? Was it because there was an attractive person walking by of the appropriate gender? Well that might have played a role in it. But the main thing was really the car that hit you. So yes, the rock in the road, the attractive person may have contributed. But the car was dominating what we see now and what we’ll see in the future.

Speaker: Along similar lines, what do you say to someone who watches this progression, who say, this is just natural variation. We have periods where it’s warming and then it goes the other way…

Karen: I think we will discuss that. So I think Andres is going to talk about the complexity of the climate system.

Valerie: Just one comment on volcanoes. We are acting as a geological force, together, as human beings, and we emit more than 100 times CO2 than background emissions.

Andre: So Karen showed this video already but I’m going to show it again because it shows kind of the complexity of the climate system. It shows the clouds moving around, but you can also see that there’s this blue area, which is the ocean, and the land which has some green parts to it, and some yellow colors which are the deserts. The green areas are of course the vegetated areas- forests. And the ocean is of course a big water source. Water evaporates there and sometimes as it moves around in the air, forms clouds. And the water also moves from the ocean in the air and then it rains over land and sustains vegetation. As you can see from the satellite, vegetation is not only an effect of the climate, but it determines the climate system itself. It absorbs more sunlight than the desert areas, which are brighter and reflect more sunlight back to space. So there’s an interaction between the physical climate system (the winds and the ocean currents and rain) with the biological system(the vegetation that is growing). And then there are these --- areas. Which is a 2 miles thick layer of ice.Which also reflects light back to space, as do the clouds.And all these different components interact with each other which make it hard, but also very interesting, to study. So it’s a fascinating topic for a climate scientist. Not only is there the physics involved, but it’s also the --- involved. As I mentioned, vegetation has an impact on the physics of the planet. Now you could have gone and talked about chemistry. Chemistry is also very important in the atmosphere (the ozone layer, for example, and greenhouse gases). Also the ocean, there is carbon dissolved in the ocean, it cycles through the ocean. The biology in the ocean take up carbon and as the plankton die it sinks down into the deeper parts of the ocean where it sequesters. Keeps it away from the atmosphere. So there is also this role that biology in the ocean also has on climate. All these different components interact with each other which makes it a hard problem, but also fascinating to study. So that’s all I have to say on the complexity. Are there questions?

Speaker: So we were given 5 questions and I think the next one is, different tools that climate scientists use to study climate. I sort of group these into 3 broad categories. The 1st one being actual observations.These can be from satellite instruments, ground measurements, or balloons or plane measurements. Paleoclimate, and in climate models. What a lot of scientists do, is combine these different types of observations with each other, to try to gain insight into what’s going on. So you never really use one of these exclusively, you combine it with these other tools that we have to try to get more insight. So there are a lot of satellites up there, this is sort of the pride of NASA, NASA’s ---satellites. It’s a group of 5 satellites. There would have been more but there have been some issues. The important thing about these is that they all sort of follow each other, so you can get a lot of information about what’s going on at a certain point, and they all provide different information about that location in the atmosphere, so they’ll tell you how much water vapor is in the atmosphere, what temperature of the clouds is, about the surface temperature and the albedo. And so each of these different satellites gives us different information, and because they’re all pretty close together, we get co-located information. So we can put together- at this particular time, this is what these different components of the climate system are doing. Now this is great, because satellites provide you with pretty close to global coverage, so you don’t have to travel to get the data. And there’s a good record about how the data were obtained, there’s a lot of quality control that goes into it. And you know they’re relatively nice datasets to work with. And they provide nice even coverage through space and time which is really good for understanding what’s going on in the climate system. But you can probably guess one of the big disadvantages- they haven’t been up there that long. So we really only have satellite data going back 30 yrs or so. And these satellites were less than 10yrs. Who knows what the situation is going to be like in the future. Unfortunately a lot of these satellite programs are being cut. Due to budgeting issues, we’re not getting satellites going into the future with the same type of coverage that they provide now. They’re great datasets but we’re constrained by that, that they’re short datasets. Now ground observations go back significantly more. This is going back to 1850 [pointing at visual] and this is the temperature anomaly. So this shows the departure of the temperature for a given year from this average. And these are all based on ground measurements. Now we do have ground measurements that go back beyond 1850, but of course the further back you go, the less reliable those are. This is just one example showing the change in global temperature over time, from 1850 to 2010. This is the advantage, that we have a longer record. We’re still using instruments and we have sort of a reasonable extent, and we have a good, what we call temporal, extent. We have data for every single year. This doesn’t necessarily have the global extent as with satellites, but we can go back longer. This is another tool we can use. You can go back a few centuries with scattered instrumental records. But if you want to go back beyond that, you can talk about this, Andres.